I’m not sure whether I’m annoyed by this behavior or not. On one hand, it’s a good thing I’m not filling up my hard drive with files I’m not listening to. On the other hand, I often let a few shows pile up and then listen to them while I’m out running errands or something and do get caught up eventually. Now I actually need to make sure the downloads are taking place before they expire out of the originating feeds.

Apple – I think this is a behavior you need to offer a configuration for in the preferences. It’s a great idea, but it should be my decision to stop downloading files, not yours.

…but frankly most of the people you will discover are complaining about feeds that have moved, or accept the “click on it and pull down the update podcast” opium. I don’t want drugs. I manage my system, I want this shit switched off, or the timeout uplifted from 2 weeks to 52.

I loaded ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes.plist using:

Developer/Applications/Utilities/Property List Editor.app/

…but cannot see anything obvious; there appears to be a bitmask (?) called PPrf:Downloads but in truth that could be anything. Going into /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj and doing

perl -pe ‘tr/\000//d’ < Localizable.strings | grep stop

…shows the exact message:

“9008.014” = “iTunes has stopped updating this podcast because you have not listened to any episodes recently. Would you like to resume updating this podcast?”;

…but knowing what the string’s ID (9008.014) is, is not terribly useful.

So does anyone know how to disable this check, or how to to set it to an enormous timeout rather than “recently” for whatever value Apple defines as recent?

I can’t believe this is still an issue with iTunes 8.1. Actually, I can — I suspect that Apple probably heard people complain, looked into it, decided that it was “too advanced” a feature to easily explain and fit into the iTunes preferences window, and that was that.

… and encourage you to do likewise. Let Apple know how incredibly irritating it is to have iTunes tell you that you don’t listen to podcasts which of course you know that you do. I mentioned in my latest feedback message to them that I would even be reasonably satisfied with a plist setting to disable it, ie. one that we could use the Terminal to manually overwrite once and then forget about. Just throw us a bone here!

From time to time, you folks at Apple make decisions that prevent Users from doing obvious things. One of them is this very annoying app-behavior/message:

(!) iTunes has stopped updating this podcast because
you have not listened to any episodes recently.
Would you like to resume updating this podcast?

Apple! Wake up! This is something that’s needed doing since the day you first released an iTunes-podcast-syncable iPod!

Consider someone archiving a podcast: she publishes a podcast, and wants to have a machine in her office download it. She doesn’t need to listen to it because she created it, but she wants it archived.

Also, the (annoying) iTunes message telling a user that s/he has not listened to a podcast recently should NOT happen if the User has played the podcast on her/his iPod. Some users like me ONLY listen to podcasts on their iPod: isn’t that what it’s for? Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case yet.

Third, if you download a podcast to iTunes and play even just a few seconds of it, it’s currently no longer listed as Unplayed. Personally, I think this should also be a pref: “Any Partial Play counts as a Complete Play” (enabled by default, which is the current behavior, but something someone like me can switch off if they want to so that just “touching” an audio file in iTunes or on my iPod would not count as a Play. Unchecking the preference would require a User to listen to the entire song/podcast/etc to mark it as “Played”. Coupled with the iPod-only podcast listening use case mentioned above, this would be a more accurate and useful way to synchronize your iPod habits with your iTunes content.

There is no good reason why these preferences should not appear in the iTunes preferences (or in the iPod’s configuration screen inside iTunes). It’s certainly not “too complicated” for users to understand, and would be entirely at home in an Advanced preferences tab.

At the very least, document where expert users can modify a .plist XML file, for goodness sakes! Then, someone like me can write clean applet hack to make it easily available to anyone who wants it to work that way (until Apple wakes up and builds it in).

I haven’t tested this to see for certain that it will keep iTunes from canceling subscriptions yet but I wrote the following vbscript to update all un-played podcasts to a playcount of 1 and last played date of the time of the script. If it were set to run daily using windows task manager it SHOULD tell iTunes that all of the podcasts have been listened to and prevent it from canceling.
Just to clarify. The script DOES update the played count and last played but I don’t know for sure if that is enough to keep iTunes from canceling the subscription.

I wondered as well why iTunes would have this annoying behavior and not include any easy way to disable it, but consider the fact that people who distribute podcasts through itunes pay for that bandwidth. I suspect that this is a way to control bandwidth.

At least if the warning could be bigger instead of just a small exclamation mark. Im subscribed to over 50 podcasts, I dont feel like checking each one every week. Like many of you, I put them directly of another device which keeps them as unplayed in itunes. Sorry for adding a solution, I just felt like venting a little.

I just tried marking all my recent episodes of itunes as played by right clicking on the title of the episode. That way itunes thinks I actually watched or listened to the episodes even though I didn’t. Then I closed itunes and restarted it. I went to each one I subscribed to and asked itunes to update the podcast and it started updating them again.

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Dropsafe is the personal blog of Alec Muffett with occasional contributions from friends & occasional guest bloggers; it is therefore a blog populated entirely by the personal opinions of the author/s.
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